In the current Spanish literary scene we find authors who excel in their overflowing creativity with which to assault one genre or another. The first without a doubt is Arturo Perez Reverte, genius of geniuses that moves as a natural environment, whether in historical fiction, essay, mystery or crime novel. But after him, others like Felix J. Palma they are being discovered as an amazing author from whom we always expect great things.
Beyond his renowned Victorian trilogy, Félix has delved into other genres in a narrative transit omen of a promising career. Although it is justice for me, a lover of fantasies and temporal projections, to recognize in his trilogy a perfect mix of historical fiction and science fiction that undoubtedly led to its international reach.
Because the set, inspired by the time machine of Wells, takes us into the uchronic, into the paradox of intervening in the past, into the most imaginative aspects of the matter. All of this adjusted to an exquisite nineteenth-century modernist setting. Because in those days when our civilization was looking forward to transcendental discoveries and transformations, it always seems like the best time to set a story like this.
Top 3 recommended novels by Félix J. Palma
The weather map
With a metaliterary background in whose space inhabits HG Wells himself, the author takes the opportunity to recover all that powerful imaginary of the pristine time machine announced by the famous English writer to enter the definitive journey from London at the end of the XNUMXth century.
Traveling to the future is not the same as going back to the past. We already know that what has already been written in a book can only present strange blurs once it is intended to be modified. The point is that in this first installment of the series its protagonists travel from here to there, in search of answers, revenge and solutions for some event that should never have happened. Another thing is the consequences...
London, 1896. Countless inventions alter the face of the century again and again, making man believe that science is capable of achieving the impossible. And his achievements seem to have no limits, as demonstrated by the appearance of the Murray Time Travel company, which opens its doors, ready to make humanity's most coveted dream come true: traveling in time, a desire that the writer HG Wells had woke up a year earlier with his novel The Time Machine.
Suddenly, the man of the 2000th century has the possibility of traveling to the year 1888, as does Claire Haggerty, who will live a love story through time with a man from the future. But not everybody wants to see a tomorrow. Andrew Harrington intends to travel back in time, to XNUMX, to save his beloved from the clutches of Jack the Ripper. And HG Wells himself will suffer the risks of time travel when a mysterious traveler arrives in his time with the intention of murdering him in order to publish his novel under his name, forcing him to embark on a desperate escape throughout the centuries. But what happens if we change the past? Can History be rewritten?
Félix J. Palma poses these questions in El mapa del tiempo, with which he won the XL Ateneo de Sevilla de Novela prize. Shuffling fictional characters with real characters, such as Jack the Ripper or the Elephant Man, Palma weaves an imaginative and fast-paced historical fantasy, a story full of love and adventure that pays homage to the beginnings of Science Fiction and will transport the reader to the fascinating Victorian London on his own journey back in time.
The sky map
Back in 1835, John Herschel convinced some newspaper to have an unprecedented scoop on the Moon. According to him, he had been able to discover, thanks to a very powerful telescope, that our satellite was inhabited by humanoid species.
And there are always those who want to believe, even more so in a time like that in which great mysteries in our environment still loomed over us. Or more than that, there are always those who need to believe..., all of us subject to our imagination. More than sixty years later, her great-granddaughter Emma Harlow, sought after by the most elite of New York's high society, knows that she can only fall in love with someone capable of making the world dream like her great-grandfather did.
That is why he demands Montgomery Gilmore, his most indefatigable suitor, to reproduce the Martian invasion described in War of the Worlds, the novel by HG Welles. But for the millionaire there is nothing impossible: the Martians will invade the Earth, although this time it is for love. As you can guess, this second part is not a continuation of the use of a saga. It is a similar setting, a use of shared settings and recurring characters like HG Wells.
The embrace of the monster
We leave the Victorian trilogy to enjoy Palma's foray into the noir genre, with some overtones of psychological thriller and again with that background of metaliterature, an approach to the universe of the literary work on which to project a plot.
Because the Monster is a character by the writer Diego Arce who seems to have taken on real flesh to begin to replicate the horrors of fiction in the reality of the author's own life. And certainly, the reader committed to something so sinister knows how to recognize the author's fears that were transferred to his story, something even more terrifying if possible for a father who sees the life of his daughter threatened. Because one night, while Diego and his wife attend a party, someone decides to bring fiction to reality and revive the Monster by kidnapping his seven-year-old little Ariadna.
In a macabre game, the kidnapper proposes to Diego three tests that he must pass live over the Internet, if he wants to recover his daughter. Thus begins a terrible two-way race to discover who is behind the kidnapping.
At the same time that he must show the world how far he is capable of going to save his daughter, Diego will also have to rebuild his life, with the help of his wife and Inspector Gerard Rocamora, to discover in his past who can wish him so much harm. .
A novel about the terrors and ghosts of childhood and how they are projected to the adult man. A story of overcoming, of love and of confronting our deepest fears.
